Phillis Wheatley

Wheatley was born in Africa, little more is known about her past. She was "brought" to Boston, Massachusetts on the schooner Phillis, from which she derived her first name. Her last name came from her Mistress and Master, Susanna Wheatley (1709-74) and Boston merchant John Wheatley (1703-78). Susanna Wheatley was ill and Phillis was initially taken in to be her personal maid. The Wheatleys also had two eighteen-year-old twins, Mary and Nathaniel, as well as several other slaves.

Mary Wheatley was Phillis's tutor in religion and language and under her guidance Phillis studied the "Bible, English (language and literature), Latin (language and literature), history, geograhy, and Christian principles" (3). Julian D. Mason, editor of the 1989 edition of Wheatley's poetry issued by the University of North Carolina Press writes that Wheatley gained "as good an education as (and probably a better one than) most Boston women had" at the time regardless of race (3).

Wheatley's spiritual influences are clearly evident in her work. Her literary influences are less so in the poems we read for today. She read a lot of the classics and imitated the neoclassicists popular in the late eighteenth century. She read Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Terrance, Pope, and Milton. Her political influences were equally important. Wheatley lived in Boston at the time of the revolution and had both loyalist (Tory) and revolutionary (Whig) friends and supporters in the city.

Wheatley's poetry was promoted by her mistress, Susanna, and she was behind the failed proposal to publish in the U.S. and the successful London proposal. Wheatley was allowed to ignore household tasks to write, her bedroom was heated and lighted at night (partly because of her frail health but also because she tended to dream her poetry and forget it upon waking. Wheatley went to sea and to London for her health in 1773 with Nathaniel.

In order to publish her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London, Wheatley had to remove revolutionary poems and anti-English poems in order to make her work appropriate for British audiences. Her poems were published by Archibald Bell, a religious bookseller in London, only after the authenticity of the work had been attested to by John Wheatley and other prominent Boston citizens. Bell contacted the Countess of Huntingdon, who was fascinated by the novelty of a black American woman poet and insisted that "'Phillis's picture'" appear in the frontispiece. According to one of Wheatley's letters, Huntingdon "'Questnd [Bell] much, whether [Wheatley] was Real without a deception" (7).

The Countess of Huntingdon

Many of Wheatley's poems are about death. This makes them elegies or poems written in the elegiac mode. Poems in this genre are typically both occasional -- inspired by an event or occasion -- and popular among a large number of readers at least for some time.

I'll leave you with a tribute to Wheatley by Jupiter Hammon, one of the earliest black writers. Wheatley was probably the first African American to publish a book of poetry, but she was not the first published African American writer. Generally scholars identify Briton Hammond (author of the lengthily titled:


A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,--Servant to General Winslow, of Marshfield, in New-England; Who Returned to Boston, After Having Been Absent Almost Thirteen Years. Containing an Account of the Many Hardships He Underwent from the Time He Left His Master's House, in the Year 1747, to the Time of His Return to Boston.--How He Was Cast Away in the Capes of Florida;---The Horrid Cruelty and Inhuman Barbarity of the Indians in Murdering the Whole Ship's Crew;---The Manner of His Being Carry'd by Them Into Captivity. Also, an Account of His Being Confined Four Years and Seven Months in a Close Dungeon,---and the Remarkable Manner in Which He Met with His Good Old Master in London; Who Returned to New-England, a Passenger in the Same Ship.

Unlike Wheatley, Hammon's and Hammond's narratives were published in the United States. Here's Wheatley's American obituary, emphasizing the occasional nature of her American publications in various magazines, pamphlets, and other popular forums:

"'Phillis Peters formerly Phillis Wheatley aged 31, known to the literary world by her celebrated miscellaneous poems'" (quoted on 12).

Source: Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, second ed. 1988. Print.